[Tutor] Starting a browser instance and passing a parameter to it.

[Don Taylor]

Kent Johnson wrote:

> I can't decide if this is brilliant or crazy or both :-)

Definitely crazy, but I hope both.

In addition, I want to be able to run these apps on a Nokia Internet 
Tablet...
> 
> I guess what you get from XMLRPC is an almost-free way to expose 
> functions to the browser. 

Yes, you got it.  Well, free as in a ~30 ms round-trip overhead.

But it forces you to build the UI entirely in
> javascript.

Yes, that is rather sad.

> 
> I wonder if you wouldn't be better off starting with a simple web server 
> such as CherryPy and building a standard web application on that...you 

Too big, too heavy, too RESTy and you have to maintain your own state.

I also want this to look and install like a genuine desktop application. 
  To start it you just double-click the server which then initiates the 
browser.  To shut it down, you just close the browser window and the 
server (eventually) goes away on its own.

> would be swimming with the stream then, instead of across it.

No fun in that.

> 
>  > I plan to use something like Google Web Toolkit for the browser-side
>  > code.  GWT (and many others tools and libraries) abstracts away browser
>  > differences.  I don't plan to manipulate the browser DOM directly.
> 
> GWT is targeted to Java developers, probably something like Dojo or YUI 
> would be more appropriate.
>

Well, my choice is between Java and Javascript.  GWT is nice because it 
has really good Eclipse-based tool-chain including a debugger.  It also 
generates pretty tight Javascript code.    Dojo or YUI mean wrestling 
directly with Javascript and its not so good tool-chain.  However, I am 
probably going to try more than one approach to see what I like best.

Pyjamas would have been nice as it was a port of GWT that had a Python 
to Javascript compiler instead of a Java to Javascript compiler.  Sadly, 
the project seems to have disappeared from the web.